Portal 2 Sold More Copies On PC Than Consoles

Though Valve has branched into console development, PC gaming is still their bread and butter. In a new interview, Valve head Gabe Newell revealed that Portal 2 sold more copies on the PC.

"We can never predict; I mean we just try to build good games and then we tend to be surprised. Portal 2 did better on the PC than it did on the consoles; Left 4 Dead did better on the consoles than it did on the PC," Newell told Gamasutra.

"So you know we don't try to guess, because we're not sure what value there is to guessing. We've never had a situation where we said, 'We really, really want to build something that is more popular for the console guys.' Because usually we have a bunch of other higher priority problems we want to solve. So we're glad that people want to play our games wherever they want to play."

Hindsight is 20/20 but it makes sense that Left 4 Dead would fare better on the Xbox 360 than the PC. It's a co-op shooter and at the moment consoles are the dominant market for shooters. Call of Duty games sell eleventy billion more copies on consoles so no shock that L4D might tilt that way, too.
Still, the deck is stacked in favor of the PC when it comes to Valve's games. The PC version of any of their titles is pretty much guaranteed free DLC, and that's not the case with their console counterparts. Furthermore, Valve owns Steam, the only digital gaming shop that sells their titles. They can hold free weekends and discounts whenever they want to in order to boost sales.